The Jazz Musician’s Most Important Tool: How To Strengthen Your Musical Memory

What is a jazz musician’s most important tool? Is it their ear? Their technique? The concepts at their disposal? All of these are extremely important, but without this one specific tool, they’re all useless…

So you can see it’s all about your ability to retain information. And that information begins by being either ear related or mind related—it’s either a sound or group of sounds, or it’s typical chord patterns, chord tones or relationships you encounter over and over.

How to get a great musical memory: The basic idea

A good musical memory comes from a few things…

First, there’s the ear part. It comes from:

Listening to music every day

Transcribing by ear frequently

Paying more attention to the music in your mind

And second, the mind part comes from:

Memorizing and drilling common progressions

Memorizing and drilling chord-tone relationships to chords

We constantly say transcribe, learn tunes straight from recordings, learn lines in all keys without writing them out.

What do all these things do?

They improve your musical memory.

You get a better musical memory by not taking shortcuts and forcing yourself to actually do the work.

The next time you hear something you like on a recording, listen to it over and over until you can replay it in your mind before you transcribe it.

Or the next time you’re taking a phrase through all keys in various root movements, rather than writing everything out do the whole process in your mind.

These things also explain why using transcription books and such are so detrimental to your progress. They’re not just doing the work for you to get a line or concept, but they also don’t allow you to get the constant ear-memory work you need to improve in this area.

Besides doing your own homework, let’s look at some specific exercises to help you improve your retention of information in your mind and ear.

How to get a great musical memory: Ear-memory exercises

Throughout these exercises you can use any music you want, but for our example, we’ll use Mile’s solo on Freddie Freeloader, starts around 2:12:

Stop the music. Replay the line in your mind again paying close attention to detail. Are you replaying just the soloist or the whole band? Can you clearly hear the pianist? The drummer? The bassist? You want to hear the whole band exactly as the if the music were playing.

Repeat this process for 10-15 minutes aiming to hear the music more and more clearly and retain it in your mind.

Stop the music. Replay the music in your mind exactly as you heard them

Listen to the selection again

Stop the music. Replay the music in your mind again paying close attention to detail. Are you hearing all the instruments? Are you hearing the rest between the two lines? Are you hearing how one line flows into the next? You want to hear the whole band exactly as the if the music were playing.

Repeat this process for 10-15 minutes aiming to retain both phrases in your mind.

In this exercise, do the same process as you did in the last two exercises, but push yourself to do a larger chunk of music, perhaps 8 bars, or even a full blues chorus. See how far you can push yourself.

Work on hearing in larger chunks. If you can accomplish the exercises with one line, there’s no reason you can’t learn how to do two, three, or even a whole solo!

Exercise 4 – Bass isolation and retention

In the Bass Isolation and Retention Exercise, you’ll simply go through the steps as before but try to isolate the bass in your mind and replay it.

How to get a great musical memory: Mind-memory exercises

Ok, now that we’ve covered the ear-memory exercises, let’s look at some mind-memory exercises.

Remember, the primary goal of these is to memorize and drill common chord tone and chord progression relationships that you encounter over and over. The less you have to think about these, the more you can focus on creating music when you improvise.

The chord tone anywhere exercise (because you can do it anywhere)

Think of any chord. How bout Ab7 for this example.

Immediately name the 3rd of the chord (C)

Repeat this for 10-15 minutes randomly choosing different chords

Now, do this exercise with another chord tone, so think of any chord, and immediately name the 5th, 7th, #11 or whatever.

You can make up your own exercises…

For instance, if I’m on the subway and I have 20 minutes to kill, I might say I’m going to work on dominant chords.

I’ll think of a dominant chord and then immediately name the #9.

I’ll do this for a bit and then say…now I’ll immediately name the b9…

And then maybe I’ll name two chord tones in a row like #9 and b9…

To make these exercises effective, you must come up with your own exercises and push yourself!

Chord progression anywhere exercise This exercise is the same as above, but uses chord progressions instead of chord tones.

Think of any dominant chord. Let’s use Ab7 again.

Immediately name the ii chord that would come before it (Eb minor)

Repeat this for 10-15 minutes

And as before, this is just one example of what you can do. Make up your own variations of this exercise with other chords.

Improving your musical memory

Your musical memory is your most important tool as a jazz improviser. Get in the habit of doing things that might take a little bit more work, but will help improve your memory.

This means transcribe a whole line, chorus, or solo by ear without writing it down as you go, forcing yourself to keep the music in your mind as you learn it.

Or when taking a line through all keys in while steps, minor thirds, major thirds or any other root movement, avoid writing it out and do all the transposition in your mind.

Make sure to do all the exercises we talked about with your own musical selection and have fun with it! See how well you can replay music in your mind, retaining, recalling, and isolating various parts.

And whenever you have a spare minute, you know how to fill it! The Chord Tone Anywhere and Chord Progression Anywhere exercises are with you wherever you go.

Make strengthening your musical memory a habit and a priority and you’ll find your entire musicianship moving to a higher level.

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